18 Unknown Years
Following the accounts of Jesus' young life, there is about an 18 years gap in his life story in the gospels. Other than the generic statement that during the eighteen years Jesus "grew in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God and men," (Luke 2:41) the Bible has no other details regarding the gap. While Christian tradition suggests that Jesus simply lived in Galilee during that period, modern scholarship holds that there is little historical information to determine what happened during those years.
The ages of twelve and thirty, the ages at either end of the unknown years, have some significance in Judaism of the Second Temple period. 12 was the age of the bar mitzvah, the age of secular maturity, and 30 was the age of readiness for the priesthood, although Jesus was not of the tribe of Levi. Commentators generally take the "Is not this the carpenter?" (Mark 6.3) as an indication that Jesus prior to the age of thirty had been working in the trade of Joseph. The historical record of the large number of workmen employed in the rebuilding of Sepphoris has led Batey (1984) and others to suggest that when Jesus was in his teens and twenties carpenters would have found more employment at Sepphoris rather than at the small town of Nazareth.
Aside from secular employment, and carpentry, commentators have also attempted to reconstruct the theological and rabbinical circumstances of the "unknown years" from 12-30. Shortly after the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls American novelist Edmund Wilson (1955) was one of the first to have suggested Jesus may have studied with the Essenes, followed by the Unitarian Charles F. Potter (1958) and others. Other writers have taken the view that the predominance of the Pharisees in Palestine at this period, and Jesus' own later recorded interaction with the Pharisees, makes a Pharisee background more likely. In the recorded case of another Galilean, Josephus studied with all three groups: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes.
The New Testament Apocrypha and early Christian pseudepigrapha preserve various legends filling the "gaps" in Christ's youth. Charlesworth (2008) explains this as due to the canonical Gospels having left "a narrative vacuum" that many have attempted to fill. These traditions were largely supressed in Western Christendom but preserved in Georgian, Armenian, and Coptic sources.
Read more about this topic: Lost Years Of Jesus
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